This Could Take Some Time
This Could Take Some Time
Clara Muschietti
Translated by Curtis Bauer
The wailing of an animal, the face of an old woman, familial relationships in multiple forms, the beauty of peaches and the thrill when they rot, award-winning Argentine poet Clara Muschietti's eye settles on how the invisible (time) touches everything.
Details
ISBN: 978-1-7329363-8-6
142 Pages
Publication date: March 23, 2022
P/Reviews
Excerpt
An account of the day a bum set fire to our car. We all knew he’d been sleeping there; the doors were broken. Every morning he’d get out, and my mom would get in to go to work. One day they argued about some orange peels he left on the back seat. An account of the fire burning outside my bedroom window, of the day I missed gym class because a bum set our car on fire; and of my face, illuminated by fire.
Praise for This Could Take Some Time
"Sometimes the plainest language is the most haunting as if a skeleton said your name at a party. The poems of Clara Muschietti in "This Could Take Some Time" are that surprising and beautiful for showing us the abundance in stark things. ‘The arrow in my heart/ is tiny but immovable./ That's it,’ she says, ‘everything I do is conscientious/ and wounded.’ Reading this collection I'm reminded of the kind of news we hear over the telephone in the middle of the night: Someone is dead, or, is born. There is an emergency, though the voice on the line is calm. So the poet wakes us and tells us something startling, that yes it is true what you have heard--we are alive. What a gift to have these poems and this translation.”
Steve Scafldl, Author of The Cabinetmaker’s Window
“Clara Muschietti’s poems have the immediacy of photographs, but also their disquiet: they present themselves candidly to the reader before revealing, bit by bit, their strangeness, their secluded disturbances, their expressive shadows, even their humor. Curtis Bauer has translated these taut, charged poems with attention to their colloquial frankness and respect for their emotional ambiguity. ‘Luckily,’ write Muschietti and Bauer together, ‘there’s such a thing as the indecipherable.’ It’s true.”
Robin Myers, Translator of Another Life
“Photographer and poet Clara Muschietti's one-of-a-kind poems live in the space between the outer world and the inner world, and translator Curtis Bauer expertly and beautifully brings us into that vibrating space--navigating between buildings, bodies, and breath, along with what we thought would be and what we see in front of us. ‘Right now/ I find it impossible to believe/ all the information/ I was given about the world,’ Muschietti writes. Inside the animal wail of these poems for a ‘broken country’ and a life on hold, there is sage advice on how to move past the present. As Muschietti brilliantly puts it: ‘I get along better with the future, but mostly with the distant future: I fantasize big time.’
Aviya Kushner, author of WOLF LAMB BOMB and The Grammar of God
About the Author
Clara Muschietti (Buenos Aires, 1978) is a photographer, poet and teacher. She has published the books La campeona de nado (winner of the iROJO prize), Karateka (El fin de la noche), Podría llevar cierto tiempo (Bajo la luna), No sé qué creíste (ediciones aguadulce, Puerto Rico), Karateca/La canción que cantás (Ediciones Nebliplateada) and Podría llevar cierto tiempo (Reedición, Caleta Olivia 2020). She received a National Arts Endowment Grant from the Argentine government in 2013, a Metropolitan Fund for Culture, Arts and Sciences grant in 2015, and a second National Arts Endowment Grant in 2021 for her latest book La paciente.
About the Translator
Curtis Bauer is the author of three poetry collections, most recently American Selfie (Barrow Street Press, 2019), available in Spanish translation as Selfi Americano (Vaso Roto Ediciones, 2022). He is also a translator of poetry and prose from the Spanish: his publications include the novel The Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito (Other Press, 2021), the memoir Land of Women, by María Sánchez (Trinity University Press, 2022) and the full-length poetry collection This Could Take Some Time by Clara Muschietti (eulalia books, 2022). His other translations include Image of Absence, by Jeannette L. Clariond (The Word Works Press, 2018), which won the International Latino Book Award for “Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English,” From Behind What Landscape, by Luis Muñoz (Vaso Roto Ediciones, 2015) and Eros Is More, by Juan Antonio González Iglesias (Alice James Books, 2014).